Rotting the Soul of a Nation

As a Canadian, we need to be concerned what happens to our neighbours. Their politics affects our lives. 

I don't typically write about this stuff, and so much has happened in a very short period of time, but Trump's speech last night was truly alarming. The whole thing is here, but the most frightening thing is this bit of encouragement for all the "christians" out there: 

"Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it'll be fixed, it'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore my beautiful christians. . . . In four years you're not going to need to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote."

This sound a lot like the very end of democracy and the beginning of a dictatorship. And in Trump's world, that will be a system that dismantles human rights for all but the wealthiest and whitest of men. From the way various members of that party talk, I predict we'll see women the property of men. Disabled people - like the journalist Trump mocked so long ago - will be left to die by merely denying care if not actually rounded up. Slave labour in the prisons will be expanded. We already know racialized people can be shot by police in their own homes. It won't get better for them under Trump. Some rumours are already spreading that Harris isn't American, isn't black, and had black kids imprisoned beyond their release dates, and others are scrambling to correct that misinformation. 

I had a moment of hope when Biden stepped down and Harris stepped up, but Trump's speech was bone-chilling for how gleeful he is about this announcement, and that he's not acting in secret. He's being totally upfront about it all. Remember that Hitler came to power legally in a democratic system, and then removed the possibility of ever losing his throne. That's what's happening before our eyes with Project 2025. He also added "we'll have lawyers at every polling station." We know republicans will do everything to keep the "wrong" people from voting. That's their schtick. 

I really hope good prevails. And maybe it's getting bad enough that people will wake up and make sure they're registered and make sure it's the right place (even if it's miles from home and changed at the last minute) and vote against all odds.    

We're already seeing this kind of thing in Canada, fascism-lite, with destruction to hospitals, schools, and  agricultural land, and billions of dollars missing. Yesterday, Ford successful managed to be allowed to commit illegal acts. From NDP MPP Chris Glover:

"Democracy in Ontario was dealt a real blow today. The Ford Conservatives know that they probably broke provincial laws with the Ontario Place Project, so they passed Bill 154 that said that, hey, this project, if we've broken the Heritage Act, the Environmental Protection Act, if any of our ministers or agents have committed acts of misfeasance, which means abuse of government power, well that is exempt from the laws, from the courts in Ontario. Ontario Place Protectors took this law to court, and they said this bill is unconstitutional. Nobody, no government, should be above the law. No government should be able to break the law and retroactively exempt themselves from the law. Unfortunately, the court found today that this law IS constitutional. With this precedent any government in Canada can break the law, and when they realize they've done this, retroactively exempt themselves from the law. It's a really dangerous precedent for the people of Ontario, for the people of Canada. It means that the government, Ford Conservatives, have put themselves above the law."

Time to wake up here, too! The fact that all the destruction in Ontario is from a premier that got 18% of the votes is enraging. And he's done this much destruction to our province in just over half of his term. I can't even imagine what else is in store for us. 

ETA: I just had a conversation with someone online who thinks Trump means, just vote this time, and after that he doesn't care because he can't run again, and they'll fix all the woke nonsense in the next four years. I countered that it's still ominous if it'll be SO fixed that people will never have to vote again. Trump is self-serving, but he also is the puppet of a much larger group, like Steve Bannon. Either way, I'm on eggshells feeling hopeful for Harris.

Letter from a British Prison: An Experiment with the Truth

 I write more about Covid than climate because we can actually dramatically decrease the problem with rampant viral transmission in the next few years with tools on hand if we make a global concerted effort. The climate is much, much more complex and multifaceted and just maybe beyond our most intense efforts. 

But check out Roger Hallam's letter sent over a phone from prison. He just started a five-year sentence. 

"This is not about five nice white middle-class people being banged up for 'protest' on 'the climate.' It's about a few million not-so-nice white people deciding to have a few hundred million brown people die. Just for starters. This is not about 'climate change'; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad things, a very bad thing, and evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being 'melodramatic,' that economies will be 'devastated,' they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that's what 1,000 public statement have said. It's what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It's coming. It is what it is. At some point, you'll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going 'well, you know.'"

We're going to see a dramatic upswing in climate refugees, and at some point we'll all close our borders as we gather around the last bits of agricultural land that's still viable and not been paved over. As the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

Hallam takes on both sides of the political spectrum:

"Conservatives are the bad guys and liberals are the bad guys who pretend to be good guys, and the latter are the worse, which is why historically they are held in more contempt. They knew, but they did nothing. As Martin Luther King said in a letter from a Birmingham jail, it's the moderates that repress, distract, sabotage the resistance to injustice."

I think they all know. I can't believe that all those conservatives see the floods and fires and still don't think something is happening to our climate and connect the dots. I could be wrong, but I believe they're more corrupt than naive. Ford, for instance, is stripping the province for parts, and lining his pockets so he and his family will be well protected for the coming collapse. The liberals are open about knowing, and then don't do anything substantial to change things, for sure. Even the NDP advocate for more pipelines. They said we're not ready for the big transition, but that transition's coming, ready or not.  

The fact that people largely don't say that climate change isn't happening, or even that it's not human caused, because both of those have been largely debunked, shows that it's not ignorance but greed that fuels them. The new denialism from those with ties to fossil fuels now say that climate solutions don't work, climate science is unreliable, and climate impacts aren't that bad. We're all just alarmists! 

Hallam writes,

"This trial was not about 'the right to protest.' It is not about 'a cause,' 'an issue.' It's civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality. This trial was an experiment with the truth. . . . We continue to speak even when the judges shouted at us to stop, had us dragged from the dock, banged up in jail. This is what evil looks like. It's what it does. And it's just the beginning. Integrity at the present time is resistance. . . . Integrity is a hard path. Your ego has to burn in a fire that destroys its desire to control. Integrity is humiliation, failure, being forgotten. As the greatest soul of the 20th century, Simone Vale [sic - Simone Weil], said: When you have an important decision to make, choose the most costly option." 

Simone Weil is one of the greatest souls to have ever lived! 

This is all about caring more about larger things than yourself, and that's not something most of us were taught in our current society. Instead, we've learned to laugh at that lesson, to scoff at people who want to protect others, who bike instead of driving and don't fly on vacation and avoid eating meat or buying anything they don't need. We've been trained to see them as weirdos because environmentalists are very bad for profits. 

But so is climate change, as we'll soon find out. 

Suffering from Premature Emaskulation?

You don't have to be an athlete or movie star to care about your health. You, too, can wear an N95 to keep viruses out of your body. This latest mutation is extremely contagious, leading to very high case numbers right this minute. If we want to stop Covid from mutating further, we need to stop transmission, which we can do if we wear masks -- especially in health care settings and schools, where transmission tends to be higher. 

The article at that link says, 

"It's very, very contagious, that's why we see a lot of cases at the moment. . . . If you don't want to get sick on vacation, you might have to take some preventative measures, like wearing a mask on a plane."

It's World Brain Day!

The WHO announced it on twitter with a list of things to do for a health brain: be active, eat well, sleep well, stimulate your mind, look after your heart, and wear a helmet. Hmmm.... it feels like something's missing!!

Just last Tuesday, the CDC Report on Disability indicated another brain issue: Covid. From McKnights Long-Term Care News: 

"Cognitive disability emerged as the most prevalent disability in the United States in 2022, affecting 13.9% of adults."

No mention of masks or cleaner air in there, of course. They're still all about vax and relax, despite it being so obviously ineffective on its own.

Then last Friday, Time Magazine featured an article on Covid's effect on the brain:

"Covid-19 is associated with possibly long-lasting changes to the brain, potentially contributing to cognitive problems like brain fog, mental fatigue, and memory loss, as well as neurological and mental-health issues. The virus seems able to damage blood vessels and support cells in the brain and may kickstart changes to the immune system that also affect brain function. . . . There are people in their 30s and 40s who have neurocognitive deficits that look like mild dementia. . . . Covid-19 can hinder cognitive performance among adults of all ages, even those who ostensibly recover fully . . . particularly on measures of memory function, executive function--for example your ability to decision-make and plan--and reasoning. . . . The results equated to about a 3-IQ-point deficit among people who recovered completely from COVID-19 versus those who'd never had it. Among people with unresolved Long Covid symptoms and those who'd been admitted to the ICU, the deficits jumped to 6 and 9 IQ points respectively. . . . The cognitive risks of Covid-19 are yet another reason to stay up-to-date on vaccines adn avoid infection if at all possible." 

Where There's Money, There's Masks

"They only insist on unmasking you and your kids because you are not valued by the powers that be. Be smarter and mask up" (from Dr. Spela Salamon)

On film and series sets, the actors are not expendable. They must stay healthy for sake of everyone's paycheque. So everyone on sets still wears a mask around them.

And athletes are not expendable. They must be protected. So the Tour de France now has mandatory masking for everyone, including the audience. And some Olympic teams are masked. It's years and years of training to get there. It's foolish to give it up because a mask is a bit inconvenient or uncomfortable. This WILL be an advantage for the Belgium team. I wonder if others will join them, or if others will claim it's an unfair advantage. That wouldn't surprise me in the least these days!!

Unmasking the Real Villain

The Tour de France is now mandating masks after several riders got Covid and had to leave the race. 

But so many other reports of people getting physically sick still attribute illness to bizarre causes:

People love to feel safe and secure, so it's comforting to think we just need to stave off loneliness to avoid having a stroke in our 20s or 30s. But it's causing harm to refuse to acknowledge that COVID is a vascular disease causing microclots in the bloodstream and definitely affecting rates of heart attack and stroke. 

Professor Danny Altmann gives an excellent interview here, explaining the seriousness of SARS-CoV-2:

Covering Up a Pandemic

Earlier today, Salvatore Mattera wrote this piece about the media silence -- or censorship -- around Covid. Otherwise known as propaganda by omission. This rest of this post is entirely from that thread:  

The 1918 flu is called the "Spanish flu" because in most places, the media censored it. Except Spain, where they reported honestly. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's a historical fact. And I think it is occurring right now again with COVID: 

This article in The New Republic - "How America’s Newspapers Covered Up a Pandemic" - provides an overview of what happened in 1918. In short, the media either avoided talking about the flu altogether, or they blamed something else for the damage the flu was causing:

"the big-city newspapers...sugarcoated the truth, practicing an alarming level of self-censorship. Any article or headline suggesting more than casual concern about the disease would be open to attack. . . . Only by putting together the tiny headlines on page 11 of the Boston Post could a dutiful newspaper reader get a sense of the full extent of the epidemic"

Is this happening again right now with COVID? I think for the first few years of the pandemic, most of the press covered it honestly (indeed, some articles at the time noted the contrast between the media's early coverage of COVID and the censorship of 1918). But as time has passed, there's been a shift towards censorship. Articles that should obviously mention COVID now rarely do. In some cases, this is debatable, like a story on student absences. But for coverage of health trends, this is inexcusable. 

Ethics of Risk Taking

If you were having a lot of sex with various people -- or even if you just had a quickie with one person without any protection, then having unprotected sex with the next person becomes a moral issue. 

Maybe it's just the case for those of use who came to age when AIDS was finally getting some public health recognition. I wonder how much that concern has dropped. Right now it's still illegal to have unprotected sex if you know you're HIV+, but ethically, having prior unprotected sex means getting tested before having unprotected sex again. Just in case. Because you can never know if you've picked up something along the way -- not just the big one, but any number of sexually transmitted infections. 

Y'all Masking: The Solidarity in Safety

It's taken off so much, it's making Twitter almost unusable for anything else. Picture after picture after picture of people wearing masks in their daily life. 

At first it was just a fun little thing - let's all post pics of ourselves in masks! There have been several other times a bunch of people have done this, but this time it's really different. I think it's because of the mask bans:

The fight is more focused now. It's no longer a gentle encouragement that masks can help stave off illness, but a revolt against barriers to preventing the spread of disease. 

Just for posterity, I think OmniAstral started it all on July 3. 

And it actually affects me seeing person after person in my feed in a mask when I see literally nobody in real life wearing a mask outside my own family. My kids are absolute rockstars for ignoring peer pressure and continuing to protect their brains!! It doesn't just bolster my spirits to see such solidarity, it warms my heart that there are people who care to prevent the possibility of unwittingly infecting others in public places. 

CDC Protecting Interests Instead of People

 The CDC finally acknowledged that Covid is still here, which is amazing, but they still can't nail the comms:

Dr. Lucky Tran added the corrections on this one to obliterate the two tiers of prevention. The CDC still have hand-washing as a priority despite also acknowledging that the VIRUS IS AIRBORNE. It's great to get vaccinated and stay home if you're sick, but we can still get and spread Covid when vaccinated, and about half of transmission is from people who feel perfectly healthy at the moment. Also, lots of people just can't stay home because some companies demand they come to work despite being sick. Treatment would be great, but it's largely inaccessible or ineffective. However, down there in that second tier, MASKS WORK! We can stop this virus (and others) in its tracks if more people wear a well-fitting N95 whenever in public. That should be number one, but that will affect the economy or some-such bullshit. 

Avoiding the Consequences

Our inability to measure long term consequences from short term gains will be the death of us. Covid,  climate change, and conflict are holding a mirror to our collective behaviours.

Henry Madison wrote about the shift back to normal that's essentially pushing us off a cliff towards the default normal we had prior to this century:

"As Max Planck famously observed, social change mostly happens not because of thought and innovation; it happens because one generation dies with its ideas, and the next then gets to run with its own ideas. (The reason institutions are so crucial is that they allow ideas to transcend generations.) So during that great peace and prosperity post-WW2, whole generations forgot what created it: Massive public investment and action. The new elite generation that came to power in the 1970s forgot that and began a process of erasing all of those 19th and 20th century public health and welfare actions: What we now call the birth of 'neoliberalism' and libertarian politics. Just names really; you need to zoom out to see the true social movement it represents. It's societies' most common form throughout all of human history: feudalism topped by some form of monarchial figure. That monarch can be a president too. The US presidency is the most regal figure of power in the world today; populism has transformed that democracy back into the social form the US had desperately tried to escape. The main point is that Covid inaction is just one further part of this same movement that's been going on for over 50 years: The removal of the 'public', an invention of the late-19th and 20th centuries, to restore societies to the form they'd had for centuries previously."

I've recently written more about that we've barely ever managed to creep out of feudalistic systems before we're swept back under again. It seems to be too much of a draw for the powerful to sacrifice the many for their own overwhelming gains, so the people have to continuously work for equity. If we relax for a second, we go under.